A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘No more politics,’ said Grace, exploiting her unexpected ally skilfully.

  Ellen walked back to Greenacres, revelling now in the warm evening, still light, those on the streets softer-mannered because of the warmth, telling each other how warm it was, how good it was to be warm at this time of day, how this was more like the thing.

  Sadie spotted her as she was passing the Fountain and broke away from the group she was with. ‘We were just walking up and down,’ she said. ‘No dance tonight. Typical.’

  They walked along the West Road and Ellen let Sadie do most of the talking while she watched the last emberings of the red sky. To Ellen a bonus of the walk to the new estate was that she would catch sunsets, plain and huge before her as she came down the hill and looked towards the sea, to Silloth and other resorts where the sunsets were famous. She loved them. When she had gone cycling with Sam before the war they had sought out romantic spots - in the Lake District, along the Roman wall, into Scotland - not only to do their courting but for the beauty of the place, soaking themselves in it.

  Sadie walked her back all the way. No one was in. They had a cup of tea and then Ellen set Sadie back down to the bridge. Even by that time, it was still light, deep purplish shade on the small hills lapping the town.

  'It said on the wireless it was eighty-eight degrees in Carlisle cemetery today,’ Sadie announced. ‘Some of them’ll think they’ve been put in the wrong spot!’

  ‘Too hot for me,’ Ellen confessed to her trustworthy friend.

  ‘Can’t be hot enough for me,’ said Sadie, and the sun had more deeply tanned her always brown skin. ‘I could live in Africa. Same tomorrow, it said.’

  ‘They’re not always right.’

  ‘They will be tomorrow. “Red sky at night: shepherd’s delight.” I thought you’d have noticed it.’

  Ellen watched Sadie begin up the hill and then turned for home.

  Speed gathered his gang early. Joe had gone down to the Show Fields as on other holiday mornings to fish for sticklebacks under the bridge but he followed Speed without demur, unafraid. Speed had shot up in height, left Joe far behind, moved into a gang of bigger boys, too big for Joe, but Speed let him join.

  The half-dozen of them padded through the long-grassed summer fields upstream alongside the serpentine Wiza river, through one kissing gate, through another until they came to the third Show Field and the object of Speed’s purpose. There was a dam built a few score yards downstream from the bridge, almost opposite Pasee Egg Hill. It turned a natural pool into a deep luscious bathing hole, black water until the sheltering alders and willows. Three boys were there adding yet more height to the stoutly constructed barrier.

  They pretended to ignore Speed and his gang but it was no help. Joe was in total ignorance of what was about to happen. He was bewildered by the ferocity of the attack. The three boys ran. Speed and the others, Joe belatedly joining in, broke up the dam. They broke it up with dedication. They used the larger stones to batter the patiently patted mud and pebbles and branches that had held the wall. They carried the bigger stones down-river and dumped them in a small deep pool. They destroyed it. ‘We need this water,’ said Speed, who led them at a gallop chanting, ‘We are Kit Carson’s men,’ back into the first Show Field.

  Here was the best place. As the river swayed between the soft sandy banks in this first field, the popular field, the field of circuses and football, it had carved out a deep swathe, a little bay. Here, traditionally, in such hot weather, the big dam was built and those who built it owned it.

  By midday it was well founded and they raced to their homes for dinner. Ellen made sandwiches for Joe to take back with him after hearing a bowdlerised version of the building of the dam. She herself had swum there, in years before the war and as she sheltered from the heat of the glowing hot day, she remembered with affection that tang of river water, the coolness of it after lying on the grassy bank, the free amiable anarchy of the boy-made pool.

  Word went out. It became a little resort, a spa, an adventure. Speed and some of the bigger boys made a raft. Smaller boys braved the trickle of water on the wrong side of the dam and hopped across stones on the river-bed. One or two of the bigger boys ran hard across the grass and leaped and bombed the water. Joe loved swimming and was developing pace in the front crawl. Here he was reduced to the breast-stroke, more sedate, but more able to look around and avoid being bombed.

  There was a girl there, who had just moved into the estate. She had come from a knot of houses in the East End, cottages just one up from mud and wattle, thrown together for weavers in the previous century. Joe had caught her eye more than once in the Easter holidays when they were playing around the half-built houses, chasing games, hiding games, easily converted into the obscure excitement of encounters. Then she had largely disappeared again, to the Catholic school. Now she was here, with her mother, but her mother was absorbed in conversation with another woman and it seemed to Joe the girl slipped away especially for him and together they played around the raft, a private game of tag, of touch, of splashing each other and showing off (him), switching from chaste to the occasional stun of flirtation (her), she in her red bathing suit covered in little blobs waiting to be popped, he in his over-large black woollen trunks held up by his snake belt, white-skinned both, larky, superficially innocent, making a month out of the long, slow, hot hours of a boon day.

  The dispossessed gang came late, after the crowd had moved away, hoping that Speed and his gang had been drawn off with them, but Speed had waited.

  The invaders scaled across the river along the fence that spanned the bridge beside the kissing gate. The numbers were about even. Speed and the others picked up as many throwable pebbles as they could find. There was plenty of ammunition.

  The raiders fired the first stone. The early volleys were careful. The boys sought protection from the uneven land and squirmed flat between the necessary boldness of leaping up to aim and fire. Most of these were boys of twelve, thirteen, strong enough now to make the stones rifle across the evening tranquil water that lay between them. Joe and Ed, another smaller one, had been dispatched to the wall itself, which gave them more protection but also - Joe reckoned - opened them to the brunt of any frontal attack on the dam.

  Speed began to work his way up-river. He was still wearing nothing but the handed-down pair of his father’s army underpants that served as a costume. His spurt of growth had made him even leaner. This long-distance battle was getting nowhere, relying on a lucky hit, not frightening enough. He crossed the river.

  But they had used his desertion from the main force to begin what Joe dreaded, a move towards the dam and now there were three of them almost there, stones hailing down as if by windmill arms. Joe knew one thing and that was that you did not run away. There was nothing else in his head as the confidence and war whoops of the enemy grew stronger and Speed, out-manoeuvred, found himself stuck behind a tree, attacked steadily and with accuracy by two of the three remaining invaders. The small section of his own forces left on the bank seemed frozen in their posts, held down by the single fire directly opposed to them over the water.

  The enemy started hacking at the dam. Speed saw it and stepped out but a stone welted into his shoulder, another hit the slender tree. These were good shots. He stepped back. He needed more ammo. Meant going further back. On to the riverbank.

  Ed worked his way along the dam towards the raiders and Joe had to follow him. The other gang were loosening the end of the wall and the water was trying to flow. Ed looked at Joe and nodded and Joe understood that he had to follow Ed. The bigger boy took a breath and then yelled and stood up, as high as the parapet, and scrambled on to it, hurling his pebbles all but indiscriminately, and Joe went after him and then there was a terrible thud on his face. He yelled, as much at the surprise as the hurt, but the yell was loud enough and then too much happened at once.

  ‘They’ve put his eye out!’ Ed yelled in triumph. ‘They’ve got his eye!’

&
nbsp; Joe felt his right eye where the thud had been and his hand came away wet. He looked at the blood with disbelief followed by fear. Speed emerged from the trees like a mad thing, hurling himself at the three boys who were off balance, distracted by Joe’s cries and his garish wound. Faced by Speed’s howling, fearless kamikaze fury, they fled. Speed’s forces from the bank now raced down to the water to be in on the action. All the invaders ran away, two of them with head wounds, though nothing as dramatic as the spurting crimson eye of Joe, which to all concerned meant trouble.

  Speed grabbed their clothes and led Joe across to the estate.

  Ellen was in. She put a cold swab on the wound and told the shivering Joe to press it there hard while with the facecloth she wiped the blood off his body, towelled him gently, took off his bathing trunks and got him into his clothes. Speed, having answered the direct questions unsatisfactorily, left as quickly as possible and went back to rebuild the dam.

  On the pillion of her speeding bicycle Joe felt heroic twinges as he held on to his mother with one hand and with the other kept up the pressure of the cold swab.

  Another quarter of an inch, the doctor said, even less than that, and it would have been the eye, Mrs Richardson. He’s a lucky lad. Joe, he said, you shouldn’t get mixed up in stone fights. Two stitches. Almost as many as Gus Lesnevich, he said, in his reassuring Scottish brogue, when Freddie Mills beat him for the Light Heavyweight Championship of the World. Wasn’t that a turn-up? Gus Lesnevich had not cried either. One boiled sweet. The plaster was a long beige scar.

  When Sam came in, Joe was in Sam’s armchair by the unlit fire, sipping cocoa, a primed invalid, placed there by Ellen as unmistakable proof.

  This is what came of fighting.

  She told him what the doctor had said about the eye.

  Sam asked what had happened just to fulfil his duty to Ellen but he knew he would get nowhere. With her. But it had to be addressed, and not only for Ellen’s sake. Such a thing could not be just let pass.

  This, she said it aloud now, is what comes of encouraging him to fight. There was no triumph but there was a level accusation and Sam could not begin to explain how even this was better than the boy being soft. Not that this meant he was happy with the pirate’s patch down the child’s face. Nor with the doctor’s remark. Not in the slightest way that would convince Ellen. But this was what happened, sometimes, in fights and better you learned young.

  'It wasn’t Speed,’ Joe said. 'I was in his gang.’

  ‘Good lad.’

  Sam skipped the meal and went straight back upstreet. Before all else he wanted one meeting. Speed was winging around the streets on an old bike someone had been scared enough to lend him for a ‘go’. He made no attempt to duck Sam but skidded the brakeless machine to an immediate halt.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Richardson.’

  'It could’ve been his eye, Speed.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Richardson.’

  His head was bent down. Sam had to resist the temptation to reach out and ruffle the spiky hair.

  ‘You’ve got too old for him now, Speed. For that sort of thing. Leave him out now.’

  ‘He wanted to come, Mr Richardson.’

  ‘You won’t tell me who did it?’ No answer. ‘So I won’t ask.’

  How could he say it? How could he close so many gaps, heal the different wounds? He stabbed at it.

  ‘D’you know what you want to be, Speed? When you leave school?’

  The boy looked up, let off, he knew from the change in tone. He shook his head.

  ‘You want to be a soldier. They take them at fifteen - what’s that? - just about two or three years on. Boy soldiers. I knew some of them. Fine lads they were. Regular grub. Good pay. You’d like that - what do you think?’

  ‘Yes.’ Speed grinned and that, with the faint squint, lit up his thin face with the whoosh of a shooting star. ‘That would be great, Mr Richardson.’

  ‘Will you promise me something, then, Speed?’

  ‘What is it, Mr Richardson?’

  ‘Bear it in mind. You tell your mam. And you tell anybody who asks you what you want to do that you’re going for a boy soldier and when you’re fifteen I’ll take you down to Carlisle Castle and see that we get you signed up. Will you tell them that? It means keeping steady till you leave school but you can do that, Speed, the same lad. Is that a deal?’

  Still the radiant grin.

  ‘Yes, Mr Richardson.’

  Sam held out his hand. ‘We’ll shake on it, Speed.’

  Which they did, there, on King Street, near the Fountain.

  Speed went on his charge around the town, imagining the old boneshaker to be a TT motorbike, but now with a rifle slung over his back and real bullets to fire.

  Sam went into the nearest pub, the King’s Arms.

  Not for a drink. A bottle of dandelion and burdock and a packet of crisps for Joe. He had rushed out of the house, he realised, in large part because he could not face Ellen’s legitimate accusation. The boy could have lost an eye.

  But yet, he thought, still, as he stepped out at a hurried march along the West Road, copper sun glinting on copper hair, smoking, anxious now, inexplicably more anxious than before, the presents bulging his jacket pockets, the boy had not welshed, he had been in a real fight, he had come through.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘This is the big one,’ Sam said, ‘the big fight,’ and Joe caught the excitement.

  Jackie Tempest of Lancaster was the first to walk towards the ring. He punched the air and as he jigged down the aisle the crowd in Carlisle’s Covered Market, oiled in the sweat of August heat, gave him a sporting hand. Cheering was reserved for their own, the local light-heavyweight hope, Jackie Moran. Sam knew him and Joe’s baying was proportional. It was the main and final bout of the evening.

  Sam had picked the back row so that Joe could stand on his seat. They were near enough to the ring.

  Everyone agreed with the report in the Cumberland News that Moran versus Tempest ‘was one of the most terrific fights ever delivered in Covered Market Tournaments’.

  Joe could not remember hearing his daddy shout so much, not even at football. ‘Come on, Moran!’ ‘That’s the way!’ ‘Come on, Moran!’

  Both men flew into it as if a first-round knockout were the only acceptable result. More like Freddie Mills than Joe Louis, Sam said, as the game pale-skinned northern lads stood up to each other in the middle of the ring and traded punches like bare-knuckle boxers on the scratchline a hundred and fifty years back. Defence was flimsy and all but disregarded. To land the haymaker was the sole purpose. The crowd jelled into a blood growl of contentment, which crested into loud delight when Moran floored Tempest in the second round. ‘What a bat!’ Sam turned to look up at Joe, his eyes glittering. ‘What a bat that was, eh?’ Joe nodded, letting his father speak for him, almost stifled with the strange pleasure of seeing Jackie Tempest on his knees, listening to the count, getting up on eight and being allowed to wade into more haymakers from Moran.

  The third round was so vicious that the crowd winced, there were moments of intaken breath, a comma of quiet, then the guttural sound swelled up again and Joe was in some deep cave, torchlit, jaws masticating grunt words, fists flailing at the call of the crowd. The clear slap-slap of leather on skin, the pillowed impact crunch of a punch aimed to stun, entwined him in the fight and he swayed and ducked and jabbed and swung with the fighters, who ended the round so exhausted by their aggression that they slumped against each other like Saturday drunks. When the bell went they wandered unevenly to their corners. The crowd applauded, the Covered Market boomed with the sound - like the swimming baths, Joe noticed, the same echoing boom.

  The boy had put his hand on Sam’s shoulder to steady himself and he kept it there between the rounds.

  Like most men watching the bout, Sam lit up while the boxers rested. ‘Good fight, Joe!’ The statement needed no response.

  The warmth and comradeship in those three syllables made Joe
feel proudly older, an accomplice in men’s matters, men’s sport, men’s ways.

  In the next round, Tempest hurled himself on the Carlisle man from the opening bell and floored him. Moran was hurt. The crowd, his supporters, his well-wishers, rolled in tides of noise as if noise alone, their well-wishing supportive noise, would in itself lift him, unbeach him, raise him up to face again the Lancastrian, now scenting a famous victory, pacing alongside the ropes, ready for the kill.

  The noise worked. Moran scraped himself off the floor by the count of seven, somehow muffled the impact of his opponent’s charge for victory, steadied himself and then, with the desperation of those who know that glory is such a long shot, that fame is not really for them despite the dreams by day in the bleak pub back-room gym, but with the hope that with one punch, one glint of fortune, a life of bare pickings could change utterly, the local lad called on every available resource. Buoyed up on the ocean of support surging in his ears, sounding all around the darkened Covered Market, he went for his man and put him down, and only the bell saved Tempest and the crowd went berserk.

  Joe looked at his father whose grin of intense pleasure mirrored and electrified his own.

  In the fifth they were tired but, Sam observed, it was Tempest who looked weaker. Look at how often he’s missing with those big punches, Joe, that takes the energy out of him. Joe did not understand that, but it was not the time to ask questions. It’s all about getting your strength back. And Moran had to nurse that cut eye. Sam tapped Joe’s Elastoplast. Cut eyes were in fashion, he said.

  It happened in the sixth.

  Moran the local hero was on top, no doubt. Even now. So punished, neither man had much of a defence. But Tempest suddenly hit home with one of his right swinging punches and Moran stopped, stock still, and as his supporters held their breath, Tempest landed what was later described as a ‘sledgehammer blow’, which caught the local man on the right temple and shuddered his skull, blanked his brain, his body keeled, no brake, slam into the canvas, he did not hear the count, he did not know that even now the crowd, his crowd, tried to lift him, he had to be carried to his corner while a jubilant Tempest, energised by triumph, saluted them.